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April 6, 2014 10:36 AM

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Quest of humans to find others of their kind is as old as the ascent of man itself. People have travelled across the deserts, scaled mountains and sailed high seas in search of other intelligent beings. This search got extraterrestrial dimension when Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli looked at Mars through his telescope. What he observed on the surface of Mars were what he called canali in Italian, meaning "channels" or "grooves". These were mistranslated in English as "canals" and interpreted as dug by highly advanced Martians for transportation of water from the polar region to the equatorial zones. The year was 1877.

By the end of 17th century people had begun to accept that the Sun is the centre of our solar system. Galileo Galilie gave observational evidence and his contemporary Johannes Kepler discovered laws governing planetary motion. The first law of Kepler states that the planets move in elliptical orbits...